I’m not yet deep enough in to SPLJ to be able to comment with any real usefulness on the substance of the argument. With two kids, four and two, who has time to read? I’m coming at this book in my own small pieces – a handful of pages at a time on the subway ride home or last thing at night.
But this is far from a bad thing. As it turns out – I need and want to read the book this way. Tom Peters on the jacket copy says it right: “This is a book to savor. Not to speed read.”
Walk, slowly, through a small set of paragraphs. Stop. Re-read. Pause to grok in fullness.
So I can’t enter the discussion on content and thesis yet. But one thing I can say, is that the writing is startlingly beautiful. When Weinberger blogs, he blogs like the rest of us – scrambly, scribbled stream of consciousness stuff. But when he writes, man does he write. There is an economy of structure, a light touch that would make Jane Austen proud. Diamond bright sentences stop me in my tracks:
“The facts of nature drop out of the Web.”
“Time like that can spoil you for the real world.”
Even when the language lists close to lyrical, the images still strike with surgical precision:
“We’re falling into email relationships that, stretching themselves over years, imperceptibly deepen, like furrows worn into a stone hallway by the traffic of slippers.”
For a warm Sunday hammock somewhere, I could immerse myself and draw deep draughts of David’s deliberation. Absent such leisure, I’m content to sample in small pieces, loosely joined. A book to savor, indeed.
But this is far from a bad thing. As it turns out – I need and want to read the book this way. Tom Peters on the jacket copy says it right: “This is a book to savor. Not to speed read.”
Walk, slowly, through a small set of paragraphs. Stop. Re-read. Pause to grok in fullness.
So I can’t enter the discussion on content and thesis yet. But one thing I can say, is that the writing is startlingly beautiful. When Weinberger blogs, he blogs like the rest of us – scrambly, scribbled stream of consciousness stuff. But when he writes, man does he write. There is an economy of structure, a light touch that would make Jane Austen proud. Diamond bright sentences stop me in my tracks:
“Time like that can spoil you for the real world.”
Even when the language lists close to lyrical, the images still strike with surgical precision:
For a warm Sunday hammock somewhere, I could immerse myself and draw deep draughts of David’s deliberation. Absent such leisure, I’m content to sample in small pieces, loosely joined. A book to savor, indeed.
